


you're made of glass (i'm made of steel)

by Metronomeblue



Category: Agent Carter (TV)
Genre: Aggressively Happy Angie, Also Thompson is not okay, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Amnesia, Angst, Anna Jarvis is taking none of your shit, Aromantic Soulmates, Asexual soulmates, BAMF Peggy, Bisexual Peggy Carter, Bisexual Steve Rogers, Dottie is Maria Stark 2k15, F/F, F/M, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, I'm thinking I'll try to have about twenty chapters done by March?, Insecure Sousa, It gets better I promise, M/M, Maria and Howard have a complicated relationship, Memory Loss, Misunderstandings, Multi, My tags are a mess sorry, PTSD, Peggy Carter deserves some goddamn respect 2k15, Platonic Soulmates, Romantic Soulmates, Shit goes down, Short Chapters, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, This is my Valentine's Day gift to everyone, also Howard Stark may have a death wish i'm not really certain here, bc I just cannot with these people, blurbs really, but the first few at least by Saturday, especially sorry for the amount of dead people and grieving like wow okay, i know i'll be on it, literally none, maybe more later - Freeform, okay so in no way did i reahc my goal here, sorry - Freeform, the nope train will pick you all up at the station if this gets too emotional
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-02-11
Updated: 2015-12-14
Packaged: 2018-03-11 15:29:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 14
Words: 7,143
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3330884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Metronomeblue/pseuds/Metronomeblue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(and you can have anything you want)</p><p>Peggy, Daniel, Angie and Jack figure out the ways in which they're connected</p><p> and everyone in their immediate vicinity explodes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. (and she said)

**Author's Note:**

> So I feel like I have to do a V-Day soulmate fic every year now? and I love this show into infinity? And I am so done with all the shipping I'm doing? And I love Maria Stark conspiracy theories okay I love them. It's ridic.  
> Also almost all of this is inspired by the song "Share the World" by SPZRKT
> 
> EDIT: omg where did my summary go??

She looks out the window and the glass reflects her own face back at her. Angie's chattering on about flowers in the background, probably about whether or not she should throw them out of a window, and doesn't seem to mind either way if Peggy cares, or has an opinion or is listening at all.

"Just give them to Miriam," Peggy says once the other woman pauses for breath. "Tell her you bought them outside the Automat and found out you were allergic." Angie stares at her like she's sprouted another arm.

"They're for you, though?" She asks, as though this is in doubt. "They're from that asshole with the red car and the servants?" Peggy would laugh, if she had the energy. Angie has never exactly warmed to Howard, and is convinced somehow that he has numerous serfs hidden away in his (frankly enormous) house.

"Howard gives people presents when he's done something wrong," The brit remarks dryly. "Whatever he thinks he has to apologize for, I don't want to know." Angie thinks this over, then shrugs and tosses them out the window, where a muffled cry suggests they hit a passing pedestrian of some variety.

"So anyway," Angie continues, "How do you feel about the weird blond guy who glares at you all the time? Cute? Not? Going in for a Jane and Darcy thing?" Peggy raises her eyebrows.

"Thompson? Darcy? No." Peggy sits up, masking her amusement with the most deeply disapproving caricature she can manage. "Fitzwilliam Darcy would never ask a lady of gentility to make him coffee."

"No," Angie seems to have no compunctions about snorting. "He'd ask her servants to do it." She takes a swig of gin from the long bottle she'd snuck in with the bouquet, collapsing next to Peggy on her bed. "I kinda wish we had servants." Peggy shoots her a look. "Well a maid, at least." Angie amends, sighing. "I hate laundry."

"Howard has a maid," Peggy notes, taking the bottle. "Unsurprisingly."

"Mmm," Angie agrees. "He also has an ego the size of his total real estate holdings." At this, Peggy cracks a grin and nods.

"That too."


	2. (there was a boy)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thompson alone

Somewhat surprisingly, Agent Jack Thompson cohabitated with roughly fifty-seven other men in the brother counterpart to the Griffith, the Frederickson Hotel. It wasn't for lack of trying on his older brother's part, or lack of funds on Jack's.

Someties he just... didn't want to be around other people.

And sometimes he didn't want to be alone.

And sometimes he wanted to be able to look out from the seventh story and imagine the drop.

Jack thought in starts and stops. Period, stop, end of telegram. Recharge, page break, indent, start again.

Switching was difficult, and the change from Work to Home was extremely difficult these days. It was easier, away from his brother and his house that remained full of memories and love and closeness. It was easier in a place that felt like a compromise- not Work, not Home, not War.

(It was easier thinking that the telegram announcing Matthew Goodman's death was still on its way to him, where it belonged, and not to some aunt in Hoboken who hardly remembered he existed.)

A new page, a new sentence, with a comforting period at the end.

It was difficult not to remember Matthew, now that he was back in New York. And yet it was also difficult to remember anything that wasn't an agonizing hiss and blood on his hands and dying lips on his. 

He wakes up sometimes, Matthew's name dying on his lips and his fingers fisted so hard in the sheets he wonders sometimes how they're whole.

He knows he isn't.

He admires Sousa, really. And he's jealous of him. What Sousa lost is difficult, he knows. It's so much more than difficult, but inside Sousa's whole, inside he's a person without decay or rot eating away at his heart.

Jack isn't. He can feel the black weight of lead in his chest, resting like a split in his soul.

(He can feel Carter's eyes on his back, Sousa's appraising gaze, Krzminsky's vacant stare, but never Matthew's kind grey eyes, never again never-)

He has tremors he hides with elegant footsteps and night terrors he hides with cold water and strong coffee.

He does his best.

He does-

He-

(He's still waiting for the end of that telegram.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> He's grown on me. Also, I headcanon you: incredibly gay Thompson. With PTSD. Happy Valentine's?


	3. (he said)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> So this is how it starts.

So here's how it starts.

Daniel gets a hole shot in his leg and he gets a soulmark around the wound.

Well okay, that's not exactly how it starts. It starts with enlisting. And Daniel enlists. He's afraid of dying in a way most of the recruits aren't, sits and breathes slow while they laugh and boast about how many Germans they're going to kill once they cross the ocean. He's afraid and mortal and small, but he knows better than anyone what it takes to be brave when you're small and your enemy is, well, not, and he feels for Britain. (He's too kind. He feels for everyone.)

He's accepted, and his ma cries on the dock.

"Come back in one piece," she sniffs, and it rattles around and around in his brain.

And, well, he doesn't. And that's where it starts, because one minute he's lying, bleeding, on the ground in France, feeling the world spin beneath him, and the next he's waking up in a cot minus one working leg. It's there, sure, but it doesn't move. It doesn't walk or run or anything a leg should do.

For six months, neither does he. He limps to and fro, but for the most part he sits and works intelligence or reads foreign newspapers. It's only later he looks closely at the aching mess of silver and pink and red scars and sees the words that wrap gently around it.

_What's your name? You need to tell me your name. Look at me. Look at me!_

He strokes them, over and over, wondering who cared for him, wondering who spent those agonizing moments holding his blood in his body and begging him not to die.

He doesn't know.

When he does come back, his ma is crying on the docks again. ( _Come back in one piece_ , he tells himself some nights and curses his foolish heart for caring.) She holds him close and her tears permanently stain one of his shoulders pale.

"You came back." She whispers it into his chest, his shoulder his neck, pressing kisses to his forehead.

"Not quite," he replies, with a small, sad smile.

When the SSR asks him to transfer, he complies, if only because someone wants him. Someone _wants him to work for them_. Someone thinks he _can_ work.

The army gives him the crutch, and he takes it gladly. Before the crutch he hadn't been able to do very much on his own, and despite the newly obvious nature of his disability, it's better than what he's had so far.

He still doesn't know.

It's been two years, and he still doesn't know.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love Sousa. I love p much everyone at this point. But Sousa.


	4. (darling that's funny)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sousa and Thompson meet.

  
Jack meets Daniel Sousa on the kid's first day at the SSR.

He doesn't know who he is, doesn't know anything about him at that point. He sees a man with olive skin and dark hair making his way up the stairs to the third floor, leaning heavily on an aluminum crutch as he attempts to figure out how to leverage himself up the rest of the way. The man's still got bandages from hip to toe, and whatever happened to him happened recently, because the kid's got no idea how to get up stairs.

He's struggling with his crutch, and from the way he's shrinking into himself, he's painfully aware of how obvious his effort must be to outsiders.

Jack feels a pang of... something. He doesn't know what, but it makes him uncomfortable, so he jogs up to catch up with the man.

"Hey," he begins, and the glare that's turned on him makes it plain what the new kid thinks of pity. Jack changes tactics. "You new here?" The other man's eyes narrow dangerously, as if to check that Jack's being genuine.

"Yes," he says finally, voice taut. "Daniel Sousa."

"Jack Thompson," he replies, stretching out a hand to shake. Sousa looks down at it for a moment, sees the long scar that runs from the middle of Jack's hand to his elbow, where the shadow of his rolled-up sleeve hides it's ugly end. The suspicion fades from his eyes, albeit gradually. He takes his hand.

"Nice to meet you." And then, with a nod to the scar, "Where'd you serve?"

"Over in Osaka," Jack grins tightly, the flash of _whiteflagredbloodMATTHEW_ rocking him for a moment. Sousa notices, his keen dark eyes traveling from Jack's strained eyes to the ridged scar rough under his fingers. He nods. "You?"

"France," Sousa hums, content to leave it there. "I'm sorry," he says, quiet and understanding and the flash of panic in Jack's eyes must give him away.

"What?" He asks, laughing a little in hysteria. Sousa turns his arm over deftly, fingers dragging lightly over the small, painful words running the length of Jack's arm.

_Please don't let me die. I love you, you have to know that, I love you and I won't leave you alone. Jack, it hurts._

"You must have loved them a great deal." The understanding in Sousa's eyes is astounding and Jack hurts, everywhere, but mostly in his heart.

He clears his throat, the words _Where'd you serve?_ and _I'm sorry._ burning themselves into his side, right where a knife would sever muscle and sink deep into spine. It becomes awkwardly obvious to Jack that they're standing in the middle of a staircase, surrounded by people passing them. 

He has a choice to make, he thinks. This is when things matter.

"I did," he says finally, then takes a few more steps up. When he looks back at Sousa, the man is guarded again, and Jack grins. "You coming?" It's a front, and not necessarily a good one to a man who sees as much as Sousa does, but he smiles slowly, _beautifully_ , and follows.

Sousa never asks about Matthew, and Jack never tells, but sometimes he catches Sousa watching him on late nights with a strange look on his face.

He grins and asks, and Sousa follows.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So we get a wee bit more development on both soulmarks and the Thompson-Sousa (or is it Thompson/Sousa?) partnership/friendship/gayness. I can't make up my mind yet. 
> 
> Just for the record, any input on anything is appreciated. I have no real, concrete path for this yet, so I'm willing to be swayed.


	5. (you keep it real)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Peggy patches Howard up. Again.

Peggy's been bled on _a lot._

It doesn't bother her anymore. Really, it doesn't.

Howard once nearly bled to death on a particularly nice suit of hers, but being Howard he replaced it the next day. Of course, not having been advanced to quite the level of wealth and prestige he had currently, it was the wrong color and missing a button.

(She wears it to work every now and then, if only because it makes her smile to know that she's wearing something Howard gave her while her coworkers are trying ferociously to track him down.)

(It's not something people discuss very often, but when she wants to Peggy can be a real asshole.)

Howard isn't reliable by any meaning of the word, but he can always be trusted to complete tasks efficiently, quietly and promptly, provided those tasks don't involve fire, scantily-clad women or potential weapons of mass destruction. Then any one of the three adjectives may prove unapplicable.

Either way, Peggy was usually glad to have Howard as a friend. But sometimes, when persuaded by luck or fate or a whim to be more than a little arrogant, Howard Stark made incredibly stupid decisions. In all honesty, she wasn't even remotely surprised when she found him bleeding all over her couch.

"What was it this time?" She asked, pulling her medical kit from under the bureau.

"Latvian swimmer," he winced, pulling at the edges of the stab wound to peer at a shard of glass stuck inside. "Threw me out a window. Publicly. I'm running from you, right now," he wheezed, thumping his head on the arm when she began probing for debris.

"Don't run too fast," she advised, dropping a particularly nasty piece into a rather impressively deep ashtray she'd been using to hold a radioactive goldfish. "You might bleed to death."

"And we can't have that," he laughed, then blanched.

"No," she smiled, pulling the suture tighter than it probably should have been. "We can't."

Howard's soulmark (or the first one, anyway) striped across her upper thigh.

_Could you get me a pen, darling?_

Howard always complained that her reply had been positioned in an unfortunate place on his shoulder, but Peggy only rolled her eyes, reminding him that she'd corrected him, not attacked him.

(He maintained that a correction from Peggy Carter was like an attack from a normal person.)

_I'm not your secretary, you pompous idiot. Furthermore, I'm nobody's darling._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I feel like Howard would bleed all over things. Just kind of unrestrained blood loss. He wouldn't even try to save his own life, he'd be like, "that's what servants are for," and Peggy would just roll her eyes a lot.
> 
> Anyway, maybe one more today?


	6. (thinking of you)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> About Steve.

Peggy has two marks from Steve. She wonders sometimes that there aren't more, because the man should've been a bloody poet, the way he spoke, but maybe it's for the best.

They wrap like a chain around her ankle, tethering her in the past. _Did you mean it?_ is a pale grey, like ice and snow under clouds. She holds out hope for that, she does, but not enough. She won't join Howard in his ceaseless, painful quest on the Atlantic.

She's been there before, and she refuses to go back.

The other, the one that burns when she runs, makes her lungs seize up with phantom asthma she never used to feel- that one's a silver-pink, like broken skin or old scars.

 _Ma'am_ , it reads, polite and respectful and insignificant, and Peggy _hates_ it. She wants it off of her skin right now, out of her very soul. She wants to remember him like that, as pain and bravery and determination so steely it outlasted a group of highly trained soldiers. She wants to remember him smiling, laughing at the look on Barnes' face when she walks right past him, wants to remember him whole and so alive and at peace. She doesn't want to remember the parts of him he hated, doesn't want his poor health and frail bones, doesn't want to remember him at all-

(The picture of him in her desk drawer says otherwise, a small voice in the back of her head laughs, and she wants to break something.)

Because the truth of it is that Peggy would have loved Steven Rogers if he had been four inches shorter than her and critically ill for the rest of his life. She would have, and she knows it, and sometimes she hates herself for wishing that had been how things went.

He'd be alive, she tells herself.

But you'd never have known him in the first place, she sighs.

But-

Peggy doesn't delude herself. She knows there are things of greater importance occurring in the world, but sometimes she likes to pretend that it's alright for nothing else in the world to be this important to her.

(It's neither true nor acceptable.)


	7. (i'll be around you)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Angie, coffee and the fulfillment of a few tags.

Angie knows what's expected of her. She does, with her big mouth and red lips and dresses that accentuate all the best parts of her- she knows, okay.

But she doesn't like doing what's expected of her. She doesn't like smiling all the time, or being nice to men who leer at her, or being prim and proper and quiet. So she stops doing those things. Most of the time.

Angie's a pretty simple person, all things considered. She doesn't like lying, she doesn't like businessmen and she doesn't like rejection. She's certifiably addicted to caffeine, she loves any and every shade of red, up to and including all the pinks known to man, and she wants to be on stage- doesn't matter how. Working at the automat was a good choice for a temporary career, now that she thinks about it. It's a come-and-go place, a train station with better food and less sweat. It's also a great place to meet your soulmate. Angies' gained a couple since she started, and she treasures every mark she has. (Peggy's is her favorite, though.)

They meet, as most people do, by pure coincidence. _Black coffee, thank you_ , stretches from the inside of her thumb up the side of her index finger, and she smiles every time she wraps her hand around a pot of coffee. The woman was wearing heels, a suit and lipstick so red that even Angie felt a little faded in comparison. When she sidles up with her smile and green skirt, the woman turns to look at her with eyes like fresh-brewed coffee.

" _What can I getcha, English?_ " She says, before she even realizes, and the woman smiles, a little amused, a little wary.

"Black coffee, thank you," English purrs back in a voice that makes Angie blink.

She gets the coffee, and nearly spills it all over when the burn between her thumb and finger makes the pot start boiling again.

"Oh dear," English murmurs, looking down at the tip of her thumb, just where she was gripping her teacup a minute ago.

Because Angie knows what's expected of her, she slides right in across from English and sticks her hand out, bold as can be. She smiles, wide and flashy.

"Nice to meetcha, English."

"Peggy," the woman corrects her, pouring her own coffee. "We should be on a first-name basis, don't you think?"

"Angie," she agrees easily, "Martinelli."

"Carter," English smiles wickedly. "Peggy Carter." The red lipstick makes the shadows around her face seem even darker, even more alluring.

Sometimes, Angie thinks, she feels a draw to Peggy. She feels the way most girls do about the people they love. Sometimes she considers unbuttoning that white blouse with such care, thinks about easing that skirt down off of her hips. But then Peggy shows her that smile, and Angie would rather have _that_ instead. It's all she really wants, anyway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Asexual!Biromantic!Angie makes me happy for reasons I cannot quite explain. Also, I'm sorry if it's not quite what some of you were expecting. I know that Peggy/Angie is a favorite around here, but this was the kind of relationship I was feeling for this story. *shrug*


	8. (i've got you)- part one

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Krzminsky's an asshole, what else is new.

  
"Want my advice?" Krzminsky asks, and Sousa can't really say _no, I don't care what your advice is_ , now can he? "Give up. No girl's gonna wanna swap out a red, white and blue shield for an aluminum crutch."

It hurts. Daniel's not going to lie, he knew, deep in his heart, that no girl was really going to want a cripple. Especially not Captain America's ex. _Especially_ not a highly-trained, incredibly intelligent, unnaturally beautiful woman like Agent Carter. But sue him, he's a romantic. For a brief moment he had entertained dreams of an apartment on the east side, dark-haired children with wide smiles, (or no children at all, he certainly was bound to have several nieces and nephews the way his sister was going on), a synchronicity borne from years of watching each other's backs in the field... but it was all only smoke, he knew. Carter wasn't moving on, and if she was it wasn't going to be for him.

But Krzminsky put that last, final wish to rest quickly enough. Daniel can't quite bring himself to be shocked, true enough, but he can't bring himself to agree, either. Krzminsky pats his shoulder as he leaves, and it riles him. The touch is condescending, as if Daniel was some tame pet to be patted and cooed at and ignored when he wasn't wanted.

He glares after the man, and it's only when he feels Jack's eyes at his back that he turns. There's a strange look on Jack's face, something like the way he looked at Carter or Sousa himself on long nights. His brow is furrowed, his mouth pressed thin, as if he had somewhere else to be, and wasn't certain what he was doing away. Nevertheless, there was always a sheen of fondness, as if he wasn't put out to be where he was and was actually enjoying himself. This time, the fondness is gone, and indignation and despair have taken its place.

He looks, by all accounts, furious, and Daniel isn't sure why, but it strikes him to the core, like lightning or a bullet might.

"Jack?" he asks, keeping his voice soft the same way Jack did sometimes, when he thought Sousa wasn't listening. The man looks over at him, eyes still wide and blank, and then turns away to look after Krzminsky. Daniel should probably not have been so surprised when Jack followed him.

He was, though.

Jack did that, a lot. Surprised him. It wasn't a bad thing, usually, but Sousa had a strange feeling tonight was different.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The next bit is a little more perspective on Thompson and his usual dimness, the broken lightbulb.


	9. (i've got you)- part two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thompson is about as emotionally healthy as a cucumber.

"What the hell was that?" He asks, the minute the two of them are alone in the car. Krzminsky looks over at him with a smirk.

"Kid was reaching. Better to tell him now than to let him be crushed when she rejects him," Krzminsky's smile is sickening to Jack, and it takes a good deal of strength to keep his hands on the wheel and not on the other man's throat. He doesn't honestly think he's ever wanted to strangle the man this much, and it surprises him.

"Better to let him reach," he mutters, and is glad when Krzminsky is too busy laughing at his own stupidty to hear.

It's only later, when Krzminsky is dead and lying in the morgue that Jack really lets himself think about why he was so upset about the comment. It's not as if he likes Carter. He doesn't respect her, certainly doesn't trust her. It must be Sousa, then, he concludes, staring blankly at his hands, at the words _I love you_ carved into his scars. He likes Sousa, admires the man. He trusts him absolutely, that, at least, he knew- he'd discovered- ages ago. Hell, he's rooting for the guy, he is.

Carter's not the type to turn a man down because of a war wound, that at least he's certain of when it comes to the enigmatic woman. But nevertheless, the thought of Sousa sitting alone at his desk after being turned down by Carter comes unbidden to his mind, and he reflexively fists his hands in front of himself.

He doesn't want him to be rejected, but he doesn't want Carter to accept, either.

He doesn't want Sousa to be alone, but when he imagines the man happy, Carter isn't there.

 _He_ is, though.

He wonders what that means.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Good god, Thompson do you not know what emotions are?  
> No, no he does not.
> 
> I'm really feeling this story, rn.   
> Also, (and I don't remember if I've already said this), I feel like I should inform you that I am, primarily, a Peggy/Daniel shipper, and so that is going to be prominent rather soon.


	10. (i wanna share the world)- part one

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Jarvises are fucking great okay.

Anna Jarvis does not start life in a good way. She screams and wails and turns blue, and it takes what seems like eons for the doctors to figure out that she's got a soul mark on the inside of her skin.

"She won't live," they tell her mother, and some of them refuse to touch her after that.

"She _will_ ," her mother replies, and refuses to let them.

She lives, because Anna Balint is nothing if not strong. She is a fierce child, angry at the world and everyone in it. Her mother worries, but the worry settles whenever she finds Anna bent over another child, yelling at him that hurting other people isn't right.

It isn't. She's right. But Hitler doesn't care.

Anna calms on her twenty-second birthday, and nobody is stupid enough to question it. Her mother is afraid at first, but Anna shoots her a smile, all relief and catharsis, and the world settles.Not for long, though, because the Balint family goes missing in early '38, and Anna comes home one day to find nothing. Every relative has vanished, and the scar burned into the inside of her ribcage throbs. She moves to Budapest immediately.

The truth is, when she was twenty-one and a day away from twenty-two a man walked up to her and told her she was beautiful. She smiled, shy and soft and wide, because nobody had ever looked at her unmarked skin and told her it was anything but disturbing. The words burned into her shin like a knife, and her thank you appeared red and angry and jagged on his arm.

She never knew his name, but she knew he was from Budapest, a city twice as large and twice as frightening as her hometown.

Having nowhere else to go, she went.

Twenty-five and Jewish and desperate, Anna Balint finds work as a tailoress in a shop five streets away from main street and all the German soldiers therein.

But not five streets away from a British officer's valet, who wanders in one day with approximately thirty-seven torn uniform shirts and no earthly idea of how to speak the language.

"Sorry, but do you know where the nearest tailor is?" He asks, in a tone of voice that means he doesn't expect an answer. Anna raises an eyebrow.

"You're in it, I'm afraid," she tells him, and the opening and closing of his mouth satisfies her in a way nothing has for a long time. She smiles, and takes all thirty-seven shirts from him. "We'll discuss prices later." He smiles at her, the same way that boy did a long time ago, and she feels a stirring in her that is entirely inappropriate given the circumstances.

"Yes," he sputters, "Absolutely." She nods, gives him a date to return, and he leaves, still looking gobsmacked.

Except he comes back the next day, because apparently nobody other than his fellow soldiers speaks English in the city, and he's desperate for company. He just sits beside her as she sews, and occasionally offers up a bit of information. His name is Edwin Jarvis, he was born in England, (as if she couldn't tell), and he has never killed a man. It's oddly pleasant

He leaves at half past seven, when the shop closes. She reaches out to hold him back, and misses by inches.

It feels like a sign.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love them, okay. I do. Everlasting testament to my everlasting love of the Jarvii. I'll post some more tomorrow. :)


	11. (share the world)- part two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anna and Edwin.

Edwin Jarvis was born in Hartfordshire, England in the middle of winter. His fingers froze and his tiny lungs filled with ice. As a ward of the state, he was kept in the same orphanage as twenty-seven other children. Each of them was older, and each of them was bigger, and none of them were kind. He preferred not to think about the first five years of his life, as cold and harsh as they were.

Most of the other children left at eighteen, using their newly-found adulthood to make whatever horrible decisions they wanted. Edwin waited, and he was right to. He got his first mark at nineteen, when he gave a daisy to Miriam Lance and told her she was going to die.

She was, he was right. The tuberculosis that had overwhelmed her for months finally killed her that night, but the last thing she said to him was forever emblazoned across his left hand- a reminder.

" _I'm alright_ ," she had said. " _I'll just sleep for awhile_." And he'd let her. He didn't have the heart not to. He had been the last of his group to leave the orphanage, after her.

Nobody missed him.

He enlisted at twenty-four, found himself advanced quickly through until he was an officer's batman. He was good at his job, it was true enough, but he by no means enjoyed it. The man he was serving under was irritable, halfway drunk at any given time, and extraordinarily messy. They landed in Hungary on his twenty-ninth birthday, the winter wind following them the whole damn way.

It was the shirts that did it. He'd blame the shirts for everything that happened after. Thirty-eight, each of them torn as if a dog had been at them, and no tailor in sight. He started on main street, evading German officers whenever possible, then worked his way down until he found a shop with a sign outside. On it were words he couldn't read and a pair of shears. He could only assume.

"Erm, hello, can you point me in the direction of the nearest tailor?" he asked, expecting no reply. A blonde with dark eyes and a solemn face gave him an amused look before replying.

"I'm afraid you're in it," she said in elegant, but accented, English. He heaved a sigh of relief, and they arranged a date and price.

He came back. He didn't mean to, at first, but he had nowhere else to go. They didn't want him at the base, and all soldiers were forbidden from going out past the ninth street down. The woman gave him an odd look as she mended the shirts, and he could feel the words spilling from his mouth like confession. She made no judgements, no comments, no replies.

She sat and listened and sewed. After a while, she began to offer up information about herself, too. Her name was Anna, her family was gone, and her soul marks bloomed under her skin like bruises.

All of this lasted for months, until the German soldiers became a German regiment and they began to hunt down the Jews within the city.

One late night, they knocked on the door of the tailor, and Edwin looked up from the floor. The tailor looked to Anna, who nodded, then grasped his hand and dragged him out the back.

"Wait, what are you doing?" He asked, panicked.

"Anna's Jewish, you idot," he hissed, locking the door behind him. "Run."

He stumbles back in a blur of confusion and despair. His officer tells him they're leaving tthe next day. Edwin looks with determination to the officer's desk, and begins to write. He brings the papers to the tailor, sets them on the counter and takes the thirty-eight shirts.

It's only later that he's dragged into the consulate by the officer. Anna's sitting there, bloody and tired and nothing less than perfect.

"He forged 'em," the officer growls, dropping Edwin into a chair beside her. Anna purses her lips and shoots him a look. He shrugs, remorseless.

"She'll have to be deported," the consul sighs, shuffling through his papers. The two exchange words over the heads of Anna and Edwin, and after a time they begin to pull each of them in their respective direction. He reaches for her, and she reaches back, clasping hands.

" _I love you_ ," he swears. Eyes bright.

" _And I you_ ," she smiles. " _You demented fool_."

They are separated, but the burn of her words under his wristwatch is enough to keep him going. She smiles whenever the handcuffs press into the soul-deep bruise on her wrist.

It's only later that Howard Stark fixes things. It takes them awhile to find Anna, but when they do she's grinning wickedly at the German soldier tied to her armchair with wire.

"You're late," she says.

"I know," he says.


	12. (ain't even gonna lie)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> About Dottie and Howard and that drunken escapade.

Dottie's not used to people meaning something to her.

She's a very apathetic person, honestly. She's never even had a soulmark before this. Her parents were glad to be rid of her, handing her off to the Red Room with little more than a flicker of disgust and shame.

"Maybe you'll be useful," her mother said.

Well she has been that. Seducing Howard Stark was even easier than she thought, especially after she realized about an hour in that she had stopped faking. That sort of job was simultaneously the worst and the best- on the one hand, the role was less taxing and she didn't have to pretend to care, but on the other she ususally had to kill her companion at the end of it.

This time was different in every way. Howard seemed to sense that she wasn't entirely brainless.

"You can stop now, you know." He had to yell over the sound of the wind rushing over the car.

"Stop what?" she asked, cursing him in every language she knew, (Which was a long list).

"Oh come on," he yelled, "I worked with Peggy Carter. I know when a gal's trying not to seem smart!"

"Alright," she yelled back. "You've got me. I'm actually a highly-trained deep-cover Russian agent!" It felt damn good to say that out loud. He laughed, looking over to her, but there was no doubt in his eyes. They were crossing the Brooklyn Bridge, it was somewhere around midnight, and she was so tired of being cold and coy. She couldn't regret saying it.

"I could believe that!" He yelled.

"You should!" She laughed, standing up so her shawl blew back and off the side of the bridge. The air blew through her fingers like feathers, and the force of it was like every fall she'd ever broken, every blow she'd ever given hurled back at her tenfold. She laughed and spread her arms out wide. Howard kept looking up at her, away from the road. There was something in his eyes- yes, desire, but a wonder, too. She sat down again when the wires began to get lower, too close to her head. He smiled at her, genuine this time, not his ususal smirk or his charismatic half-smile. It was shaky, unused. Just a little fragile. And _all for her_.

When they reached his hangar, she pressed him up against the wall. The dark fabric of her dress rustled softly as she drew her hips across his. He drew in a breath and flipped them, so that this time it was her back to the wall.

" _I wasn't lying_ ," she gasped, even though she knew she shouldn't, even though he was positioned to easily overpower her. Even though his lips drew so softly across her neck. "On the bridge."

He smiled up at her in the dark, head still bent to her shoulder.

"I know. All you've done since we got here is catalogue what I've got in here."

"I'm dangerous," she whispered, half-wanting him to stop, half-wanting him to accept it and run. "I'm capable of killing you in an instant." She wants him to be scared.

" _You're everything I've ever dreamed, Ida,_ " he said instead, pressing his lips to the underside of her jaw, and she can only sigh as those words burn themselves into her arm. They're silver and deep, tracing up from the inside of her arm- elbow to wrist.

"You must have a lot of nightmares," she laughed into his hair, giving in, embracing this unnameable feeling in her chest.

Later, she'll kidnap him and tie him to a chair and force him to potentially kill hundreds or thousands of people. She won't understand why she's relieved to hear he survived, or why she was so upset he'd forgotten a name that was never even hers.

Maybe, she'll think, alone and tired on a rooftop in New York City, maybe it's because the name on the inside of her wrist isn't hers.

Maybe she wanted to be Ida, maybe she wanted him to love her, maybe she wanted him to die.

All she knows is that she'll wait on his rooftop for one more hour. If he doesn't come up, she'll walk right down those stairs and slit his throat. If he does... She doesn't know what she'll do, but it will be kinder. She knows that much.

She turns, roused by the sound of the door opening.

"Ida?" He asks, and there's a bit of fear in his eyes, a bit of desire.

And that same wonder, like he meant what he said to her in that warehouse.

"Maria, actually," she says quietly, giving him a small, fragile, shaky smile. A real one, all his. "Maria Carbonell."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dottie needs some love like everyone else. Also, now that her doctor's in jail, she doesn't have much of a mission anymore.
> 
> Also, the dialogue in italics is what their soulmarks are, in case you're wondering.
> 
> A good song to listen to for this chapter is "Help" by Hurts. I love their music, and about 2:20 on is pretty good for the bridge scene and everything after. :D


	13. (you're made of glass)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Peggy's not having a great week.

Peggy doesn't speak to Howard for weeks, after.

Jarvis tries to play go-between, endlessly passing messages from Howard to her, but none of them seem to penetrate her shell. She refuses and refuses and refuses, burning file after file in the basement, her fingers charred with the ruin of her life.

She won't speak to the man marrying the woman who tried to kill them all.

If that's Howard, then all the worse for him.

Daniel comes down sometimes, leans against the wall when his brace and crutch can't support him anymore. She doesn't look back at him, and he never asks her to, just watches her with understanding in his dark eyes.

Jack follows where Daniel does, stands at the top of the stairs. More distant, more cold. More uncomfortable in that understanding and silence, in that barren war zone where once friendship lay dying.

He calls Daniel back, eventually. Asks him to do something, follow up a tip, finish some paperwork, always something important. Jack's a lingerer, though. He can't move on, can't leave that ashen basement as easily as Daniel.

"You need to stop," he tells her one day. Quietly, seriously. Dangerously. "You need to let him move on."

Peggy doesn't answer. She doesn't quite know how.

She doesn't know what to say.

She saw the words, when he was knocked out in the infirmary. She had felt that echo call, the unfinished business of an unconfirmed mark. It reached up inside of her, knocked the words out of her and pulled her down to his bed. The ice-white words, like shrapnel or scars, had crawled, expanded, invaded his skin.

They had grown, repeating themselves endlessly up and down his body. She had to roll up his sleeve to see them in full, and when she did she felt the jab of a matching mark in her fingers. She stopped dead in her tracks, a sudden recognition flooding her.

_What's your name? You need to tell me your name. Look at me. Look at me!_

 

It couldn't possibly be him.

**No.**

Peggy unrolled his sleeve, checked his pulse, then left the room. She was ice cold, numb and tired and on high alert, like she was still in the Black Forest with Steve and the Howling Commandoes. She was shaking, her right hand flexing and closing, flexing and closing, closing, closing, closing.

Because she remembered saying those words. She remembered kneeling in the bloody grass in France, tying a tourniquet with her jacket and feeling a pain in her hand like she'd burned it as she pulled the fabric tight. She remembered begging him to stay awake, to keep breathing. To not leave her. She opened her hand again, staring sightlessly down at her fingers, at the deep, scar-pale words that were carved into her trigger finger. The words that had haunted her through the war and after it, written in the hand of a man she'd come to care for.

_No, please. Please, let me die._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That was climactic, right? I wanted that to be pretty climactic.


	14. (i'm made of steel)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things come to a head.

"It was you, wasn't it?" He asks her one day, and she wasn't expecting it from him.

"What was me, Agent Thompson?" She asks, typing up someone else's report. He lopes into the room, all long, slow legs and sharp eyes.

"Sousa's match. That mark on his knee that grew like a rash when he got hit by Stark's stuff- you're the one who made it, aren't you?" She keeps typing, focusing very intently on where her fingers land.

"I wouldn't know," she says carefully. "I'm afraid I've never seen his knee, Agent Thompson. Have you?" His eyes darken, and he makes a face like he wants to defend himself, but not to her. She lets it go.

"I know it was you," he hisses, finally, swooping in to threaten her. "If you hurt him, I'll-" He reaches up as if to grab her by the throat.

"I assure you, Agent Thompson," she says vehemently, catching his wrist before it dares to make contact, "I have no such intention."

His eyes narrow, and he snatches his hand back like her touch burns. She stands, matching him step-for-step.

"Don't," he says, something resigned in his tone.

"What's goin' on?" the man himself is standing in the doorway, looking a cross between confused and worried. Thompson stands, shoots a nebulous look at Peggy, then says, with no prelude:

"Carter's your soulmate." Daniel's eyes snap to Peggy, and she meets his gaze defiantly.

"Thank you, Agent," she says icily. "But that's not exactly how I'd put it."

"It was your mark that overtook him," Thompson spits out, forcing the words through his lips as if he wants to swallow them instead. "Not any of his family's, not mine-" he stops there, the words seizing in his throat.

Peggy closes her eyes.

_Oh._

"Is that what this is about?" Daniel asks quietly. There's a sadness in his tone, a disappointment.

"She's your _soulmate_ ," Thompson repeats, spreading his hands as if this illuminated everything. Peggy reached out to turn over his hand. There, torn into his arm, jagged and broken, is the _I love you_ he hides with his every breath. She reaches out again for his other hand, brings them parallel to each other, so Daniel's mark and Matthew's line up. Thompson inhales shakily, tries in vain to pull his hands back. Peggy instead clasps each of his hands very tightly in her own. She traces Matthew's last, desperate breath.

"You, too?" She asks, and Jack suddenly remembers that he's not the only one who's been mourning.

"Me too," he agrees, and the small sentence burns itself into his sternum. She makes a small noise, and reaches up to the back of her neck.

"I've been lying to you, Daniel," Peggy says, clearing her throat of sympathetic tears. Daniel looks more angry than she's ever seen him, and she nods, because he should be.

"It was you," he says, eyes clearing.

"It was me," she repeats, turning her hand upwards in Thompson's grip. She can tell the moment he reads Daniel's words, because there's a spine-deep shudder that flows through him and he gasps, just a little, before he clamps his mouth shut. "I didn't know how to tell you."

"But he did?" Daniel asks, a little incredulous.

"I had to," Jack says suddenly. "You-" he pauses, iron eyes soft and pained. "You deserve to be happy."

And Daniel, only half-confused now, feels a pressure behind his eyes like tears waiting to fall.

"Why?" He asks Jack, who looks at him helplessly and struggles for words.

"I-" Peggy answers for him.

"Because he loves you," she says with finality and understanding in her voice. "And rightly so."

Both Jack and Daniel look to her in surprise and she smiles sadly.

"I do have good taste, you know," she says, looking sheepishly at Daniel. He swallows.

"Oh," he says, and Jack looks down at her like he doesn't know what to say to her.

"We need to talk," He says, still trying to breathe properly in the wake of the whole thing.

"Coffee, then?" She suggests, finally letting go of Jack's hands.

"Yeah," Daniel says, a little breathlessly. "Yeah, coffee sounds great."

Jack nods, and Peggy leads them out, leaving the report for someone else.

"I think you've met Angie already?" She asks, starting down the stairs. "She'll be delighted to hear." Daniel smiles, and Jack shakes his head, and they all sigh just a little, but the tension that had been boiling for the last few days had calmed, like a storm retreating.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So there was some closure... Kind of? Things are getting wayyyy more complicated and emotional than I originally expected.


End file.
